Leadership

About Us

Coverage

About our leadership team

With deep domain expertise in networking and web infrastructure from the likes of Cisco, VMWare, Dell, Juniper, HP, and IBM, our mission is to build better, faster, and easier networks.

Josh Leslie | CEO

JR Rivers | Co-Founder & CTO

Ami Badani | VP of Marketing

Jim McNicholas | CFO

Kaushik Shirhatti | VP of Worldwide Field Operations

Partho Mishra | VP of Engineering and Product Management

Sandy Palicio | VP of Human Resources

Board of Directors

Board members

JOSH LESLIE | CEOCumulus Networks

JR RIVERS | CO-FOUNDER + CTOCumulus Networks

KIM HAMMONDSIndependent

PETER LEVINEAndreessen Horowitz

SCOTT TOBINBattery Ventures

Board observers

BILL COUGHRANSequoia Capital

LISA EDGARTop Tier Capital Partners

Mark ShermanTelstra Ventures

Board advisors

ALEX BENIKBattery Ventures

Martin Casadoa16z

Mark LeslieLeslie Ventures

Investors

Josh Leslie — CEO

Josh is a seasoned technology executive who brings over eighteen years of industry experience to Cumulus Networks. He was previously at Instart Logic where he was their first Sales Executive and was responsible for helping sign and cultivate Instart's first 150 enterprise customers, participating in over $50M of venture capital fundraising and growing the company from 30 to over 130 employees.

Prior to Instart, Josh spent six years at VMware and held leadership roles in both sales and business development as the company scaled from less than $100M to more than $1B in sales. Before VMware, Josh was a field rep for CommVault Systems. He began his career as an analyst and associate in investment banking where he advised technology companies on financing and M&A strategies.

A Bay Area native, Josh received a BA from the University of California, Berkeley and an MBA from Columbia Business School.

JR Rivers — Co-Founder & CTO

JR is a co-founder and CTO of the company where he works on company, technology, and product direction. JR has been involved with networking since Ethernet only ran on coaxial cables. He's worked on some of the most foundational networking products of their time, from early Network Interface Cards at 3Com through switching and routing products at Cisco. JR's early involvement in home-grown networking at Google and as the VP of System Architecture for Cisco's Unified Computing System both helped fine tune his perspective on networking for the modern datacenter.

Ami Badani — VP of Marketing

Ami is VP of Marketing at Cumulus Networks responsible for all aspects of marketing from messaging and positioning, demand generation, partner marketing, and amplification of the Cumulus Networks brand. She has a decade’s worth of experience at various Silicon Valley technology companies. Most recently, Ami served as a key marketing leader at Instart Logic, helping to triple its sales growth and lead the disruption of the application delivery market. Prior to Instart Logic, she was Head of Strategic Marketing at Cisco where she co-founded and incubated the Internet of Things Platform as a Service business and launched the platform out of stealth mode. She began her career in various facets of investment banking and asset management at Goldman Sachs and JPMorgan. Ami has an MBA from University of Chicago, Booth School of Business and a BS from University of Southern California.

Jim McNicholas — CFO

Jim is our Chief Financial Officer. Most recently, he served as the CFO for Panasas Inc., an advanced storage systems company. He held prior CFO roles for VSS Network Monitoring Inc. as well as 2 solar semiconductor firms. He entered the venture capital funded world after serving as the VP of Finance for 4 divisions of IBM (Hard Disk Drive, Storage Subsystems, Consumer, and Open System Servers & Software) as well as the hard disk drive subsidiary of Hitachi. Jim received a BS in Commerce & Engineering from Drexel University and an MS from the Stanford Graduate School of Business.

Kaushik Shirhatti — VP of Worldwide Field Operations

Partho Mishra — VP of Engineering and Product Management

Partho is VP of Engineering and Product Management at Cumulus Networks. Prior to joining Cumulus, Partho was running the RASA Network Analytics team at Aruba where he lead as CEO and then VP after RASA was acquired by Aruba in 2016. At RASA analytics, Partho’s team was in charge of developing a product that used ML/AI techniques to analyze data collected from network infrastructure to help Aruba customers with optimizing their wireless network and improving user experience.

Previously, he was Vice President and General Manager of Cisco’s Service Provider Access Business Unit with responsibility for Metro-Ethernet and Wireless Backhaul products including the ASR 901, ASR 903, ME 3400 and CPT 50 products.

Partho is no stranger to bringing startups to the next level. Prior to being acquired, RASA was a VC-funded startup with Khosla Ventures as the lead investor. Additionally, he was involved as part of the initial technology/founding teams in two Silicon Valley start-ups: Airgo Networks (acquired by Qualcomm) and Iospan Wireless (acquired by Intel) that developed the first MIMO Wireless LAN and Wireless WAN technologies/products respectively.

Sandy Palicio — VP of Human Resources

Sandy has spent her career leading and growing HR Organizations in Silicon Valley. She was most recently with Juniper Networks where she led the Business HR organization for the global product and engineering teams. Sandy previously consulted for a number of Startup organizations, helping them build scalable effective Talent Acquisition practices and HR capability. Prior to that, Sandy ran Human Resources for Creative Labs where she was responsible for a global organization of over 50 HR professionals supporting 5,000 employees. Sandy brings a passion for people, leadership, and organizational effectiveness to Cumulus Networks.